Top 6 Graphs that Refute Donald Trump’s Lies about the United States

AP’s Fact Check found that as usual Donald Trump’s statistics in his GOP acceptance speech are way beyond the ‘damned lies’ level. So here are some illustrative graphs to suggest the level of his duplicity:

“Homicides last year increased by 17 percent in America’s 50 largest cities. That’s the largest increase in 25 years.”

Actually violent crime including murder has fallen precipitously in the US since 1990. The murder rate is historically low, which means that year to year statistical fluctuations can easily be exaggerated. (Note that when you say things like ‘in the 50 largest cities’ it is a sign you are tinkering with the sample).

With regard to Mexican immigration, actually more Mexicans leave the US annually than come. A Pew Charitable Trust poll found some corroborating evidence that the wave of Mexican immigration in the 1980s and 1990s has long declined– fewer and fewer Mexicans say they have friends or family in the US:

Trump’s fixation on Mexican immigrants focuses on something that was an maybe an issue decades ago, when he still had normal hair.

Trump said, ““The number of police officers killed in the line of duty has risen by almost 50 percent compared to this point last year.”

This is simply not true. The number is up to 67 from 62. Every life is precious, and no police should be dying on the job, but the number of officers felled annually is quite low in a country of 320 million, and Trump is just making stuff up again. AP points out, “the 109 law enforcement fatalities in 2013 were the lowest since 1956.”

Trump said “My opponent has called for a radical 550 percent increase in Syrian (refugees). … She proposes this despite the fact that there’s no way to screen these refugees in order to find out who they are or where they come from. I only want to admit individuals into our country who will support our values and love our people.”

The percentage increase sounds so big because the US has been taking almost no Syrian refugees. The US has taken a iittle over 13,000, while Turkey has taken 2.5 million. The US Congress passed a Syria Accountability Act in the Bush era to destroy the Syrian economy and the US has armed and funded hard line Salafi rebel groups, so maybe we owe something to the 11 million Syrians we helped make homeless.

Refugees are intensively vetted in a process that takes 18 months to two years. Trump’s allegation that these people are not being vetted is a lie. Of some 750,000 refugees let into the US since 2001, only 10 have been found to have been involved in anything like terrorism, and that was usually a matter of sending money to the wrong group overseas.

There is virtually no acknowledgment in the UK that we are even the tiniest bit responsible for the refugee crisis in Syria and/or the ISIS situation. People here think more war is the answer.

Racism has swept this country big time, anything brown or muslim is a no go. Reality is the prosperity of pakistanis in this country over the last 40-50 years has driven much anger from average beer guzzling football hooligans who have no jobs/qualifications or prospects.

I generally agree with the first paragraph, there seems to be a historical culture of civility at home, and jingoistic violence abroad among the ordinary people.

Racism rise other factors :

The advent of the internet freeing popoulist voices from civilised (or P.C.) controls.

A post Cold War Back to the Future, return to tribalism via Huntingdonian assaults upon Rootless Cosmopolitanism (in modern terms Multiculturalism, Integration “debate”).

The demographics of working class British born youth gangs of Muslim origin, being assimilated into a predatory street culture within a sexualised public sphere with easy access to vulnerable children.

Juan you need to keep posting but I would argue that the situation demands a much more urgent tone.

Trump has no respect not just for people of color, but anyone but himself. He has no respect for or knowledge of the Constitution, for history or science of any sort. That could be said of just about the whole of the GOP, but he has added a heaping and ominous serving of neo-Fascism to boot: utter disregard for truth, willful flouting of any form of social contract, calls for violence, and an active call for violations of every principled alliance, convention, and treaty from Geneva to NATO to Nuremberg.

I have said it in comments over and over again, the GOP will eventually need to be outlawed as a white supremacist organization. It may disintegrate on its own. But Trump may get elected. Will he lay down power in four or eight years? Do we trust him to? What if he declares a permanent state of martial law? What if the GOP doesn’t lose down ballot and he gets in – will a GOP Congress rubber-stamp every dictatorial decree? Will he arrest his opponent(s)? We will no longer recognize the country because there will not be one. It can happen here – and is before our eyes.

Timothy Egan wrote this morning that we are at our most dangerous moment since the civil war. We can quibble as to whether 1861-5 or 1941-5 was the republic’s most dangerous moment. But this is certainly comparable. And regardless, so much damage has been done – what happens if and when Orange Julius betrays his supporters and things are no better for them? Will they have recourse to arms?

Honestly, we are playing Russian Roulette with our country, and the GOP is forging a chain that its ghost will find heavy to bear. As of this morning though there really is no GOP anymore is there? In this country now, there are just democrats (small “d”), and fascists.

When Trump is gone, his ability to extract maximum votes for minimum expenditure via cheap, cheap hatred will not be forgotten. It will be exploited again and again by younger, more charming sociopaths until the country explodes.

“It will be exploited again and again by younger, more charming sociopaths until the country explodes.”

Well that is my other dark scenario. A while ago I had a conversation with some journalist friends. They were shocked at my pessimism, but I told them we very well stand to lose our republic still with a civil war or to tyranny, and I hold to my refrain that decades from now when all this crap filters out (if there is a decades from now – a Trump presidency renders that quite dubious), the GOP will need to be outlawed just as the Nazis were in post-war Germany, just as, frankly, any white supremacist group deserves to be. The convention this past week wasn’t so much a convention as a necromancy of 1930s Germany, and age has not made the corpse of the Third Reich smell any better.

trump bla blah blah. meanwhile the latest refugees created by our bombing and foreign policy are stranded in the desert outside fallujah in 127 degree heat. who needs trump when the democrats are doing such a great job as the war party.

How would you feel having the war right here in the Black and Latino neighborhoods of your fellow citizens? Death squads aren’t just an Iraqi or Syrian civil war feature. And we have 80,000,000 potential victims.

Trump is no doubt a liar and almost totally ignorant of foreign affairs. He is, nonetheless, a brilliant promoter and one of the best about reading the fears of America and playing to them. The Democrats are about to make a horrible mistake in nominating Hillary Clinton. She is the only Democrat who could conceivably lose to Trump. Her campaign so far and her VP choice show that she and the Dem establishment are almost totally out of touch with the way Americans feel right now. She cannot win with only minority support. Most of the country wants real change and a break from Wall Street control and she is tone deaf on these issues.

Yes, it’s really disgusting the Democrats made absolutey no attempt to listen to the electorate in the face or rising support for Trump. They refused to listen to Sanders polll showing he had a competitive edge with Trump over Hillary. It’s unclear which Party will dissolve after November. If Trump wins the country has no one to blame but Democrats.

A trivial comment, but I counted only 5 charts and graphs, not 6?!? But I sure hope the mainstream press highlights more of these lies! SEe New Yorker article about Trump’s ghostwriter this week–excellent deflation of his life of lies.